Today search engines, web sites, messages sent to UEs (User Equipments) etc. display advertisements, hereinafter in the description called ‘ads’, for business including a telephone number to call in order to contact the business. To correlate the display of an advertisement, hereinafter in the description called ‘ad’, for the consumer and the subsequent telephone call placed by the consumer, typically the business is provided with a specific telephone number for that particular ad. If that number is called, it can be concluded that the ad was successful. There is typically one specific telephone number provided per ad campaign and per advertising channel to be able to understand which ad the consumer has, in a positive way, acted upon, thereby being able to, for example, assess whether an ad has been successful or not.
A comparison/correlation of data is very important for ad brokers and advertisers to evaluate how successful the ad in itself is and how successful the ad channel is, e.g. the web site or the message form that the ad was exposed on. It also enables performance based advertising models, where advertisers only pay for actions considered to have been generated by or associated with the ad. Such an action can be that a call is made to the telephone number displayed on the ad.
Existing solutions, using so-called call-tracking, requires the advertiser to be provided with many campaign specific telephone numbers and runs the risk that customers get confused about which phone number that is the advertiser's “real” phone number. Campaign numbers typically also stop working a certain time after the ad campaign has finished and customers may have remembered them as the main contact number, which is not good for the customer and the advertiser.
The company Google today runs call-tracking with local ads displayed in conjunction with a map application. Google's solution uses multiple, or specific, numbers provisioned via a service called Google Voice.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,424,442-B2 describes another example of a call-tracking system with a dynamic allocation of telephone number to an ad on a just-in-time basis; and if the telephone number is not called for a predefined period of time then the telephone number is unallocated.